I am very excited to announce the release of JMP Genomics 5! Our latest version provides many new tools for downstream analysis of large genomics data sets. We’ve incorporated enhancements across almost all functional areas of the product – expression, SNP, copy number, predictive modeling, and enrichment analysis.

With this our ninth production release of JMP Genomics, we followed the development of a major JMP release more closely than ever: JMP Genomics 5 was released on the exact same day that JMP 9 was released. JMP Genomics 5 replaces JMP Genomics 4.1 as the version that ships to new customers, and the new version will be shipped to current customers over the next couple of weeks. By the way, if you are a JMP Genomics license administrator and do not automatically receive the new version by early November, please contact SAS Contracts Support with your site number and site name to request it. (We will also e-mail this information to all license administrators.)

The official marketing launch of JMP Genomics 5 in early November will coincide with the American Society of Human Genetics meetings in Washington, DC. So please look for our press release around that time, and if you are at the conference, please stop by to visit us at our JMP Life Sciences booth! We’ll be glad to talk to you and answer your questions about JMP Genomics, JMP Clinical, JMP, SAS/Genetics, or other SAS tools. JMP Life Science developers Wendy Czika and Kelci Miclaus and documentation specialist Thomas Pedersen will be attending the conference with me, as will SAS Director of Scientific Discovery and Genomics Russ Wolfinger. We would love to hear your feedback or questions.

For the JMP 9 release, our life sciences developers were among a growing number of internal groups at SAS that I would call “early-early adopters” of JMP. Various groups, including ours, are using JMP as an interactive front end to SAS procedures and applications. As such, we are testing major features as they are implemented by JMP development. During the development of JMP 9, our life sciences group had a hand in testing the new JMP menu customization system, the JMP 9 add-in infrastructure, scripting changes including namespace implementation, as well as R integration features.

I believe it is extremely helpful for our group and others like it at SAS to be involved in shaping these important features as they are being developed by JMP. This constant exchange of bug reports, “user” feedback and the resulting final tweaks all improve the experience of customers who will be building their own real-world applications with JMP 9 and SAS, or incorporating custom analytics as JMP add-ins. We could not hope for better development partners! I would like to extend a special thanks to the folks in JMP development, testing, source management and documentation groups for all the work they did to make JMP 9 a fantastic platform on which to build JMP Genomics 5. An extra special thank you goes to Bob Hickey, who handles the build and release engineering process for all JMP products, for all the help near the end of the release cycle.

As a product manager, I always feel like I have a split personality at the time of a new release. While I’m working on release plans for the newly launched version with one half of my brain, the other half is occupied with plans for future releases. Russ’ life sciences development team has already moved quickly to bring JMP Clinical over to the JMP 9 platform in preparation for next spring’s JMP Clinical 3 release. Together with my fellow life sciences product manager, Geoff Mann, I’m thinking ahead for JMP Genomics 5.1 and JMP Clinical 3.1. Every time I think this has got to be the best release ever…and it always is!